Little Tina’s Wonderland review
need to know
What is it? Bigger than an expansion pack, smaller than the standalone Borderlands game, but still very much like Gearbox joke raiders.
Release date March 25
expect to pay $60/£60
developer Transmission software
Publisher 2K games
audit date Windows 10, Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAM, RTX 3080
multiplayer game? 4 people cooperate
association Official website
Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep is an expansion of Borderlands 2 that doubles as a beloved parody of Dungeons & Dragons, coming out in 2013. That was the year D&D’s fifth edition reignited interest in the game, and two years before the premiere of Key Characters. At the time, jokes about D&D seemed fairly niche. It was a surprising move for a shooter’s expansion, and it paid off. It touched unexplored veins and quickly became everyone’s favorite DLC. However, what about 2022? D&D is as popular as ever, bordering on cultural oversaturation, and Tiny Tina’s wonderland is back in a near-depleted well.
While Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands looks like a vibrant fantasy comedy, it plays like a Borderlands game. Specifically, Borderlands 3. Some guns fire crossbow bolts, and grenades have been replaced by spells, but at the moment, it’s a typical Borderlands game – you shoot hordes of bad guys who repeat neat one-liners, then compare loot to see what’s new Are the guns and shields better than the old ones and do it again.
(Image credit: 2K Games)
Gundlands
As a review of a Borderlands game, I’m legally obligated to tell you the best guns its random loot pool spit out for me. The sniper rifle that shoots blades is a big plus, the more blades, the higher the damage of each blade. The Tediore gun that doesn’t need to be reloaded – instead turns into a throwable dynamite and then teleports a fully loaded replacement into your empty hand — has come back and I got one that didn’t turn into dynamite but instead The guns of the laser pixie harass the bad guys. Another summoned Hydra head will spit poison. This is good.
A big change is character creation. Instead of each class being tied to a separate character, you play as an unnamed “newbie”, build a face and color scheme and choose a voice (you can even change the pitch, which is what I’ve been doing since Saints Row 4) never seen option) and choose any course you like.
I spent most of my time as a spore guard, a fungal ranger, and I upgraded a walking mushroom pet, so he put poison. Some classes get NPC allies; my partner plays a gravekeeper who unlocks floating skulls. My mushroom buddy really becomes himself when I’m playing solo, rejuvenating me when I’m dropped without a partner. While co-op is a chaotic good time as usual, having an NPC ally makes solo play a more viable option, and it’s already a completely satisfying way to play.
I do have to revive this friendly fungus sometimes too, which has caused me trouble more than once. Although actually the worst thing about him is how distracting he is. When the quest giver speaks, he’ll jump around in the background, his floating title mushroom companion appearing in large white text visible on the NPC’s face. His unusually detailed hips are also distracting.
(Image credit: 2K Games)
The caster’s class ability, being able to insert two spells instead of one, doesn’t look impressive, although when you get the spell that casts ice meteors on skeletons – since they don’t have skin to keep them warm, they get extra Frost damage – it’s almost worth it. But a bayonet warlock capable of throwing a spinning melee weapon that turns into a blade tornado that you can reposition on the battlefield? This is my current favorite.
Melee weapons are new additions, but not game-changing weapons. Your regular melee attack, which is still mapped to V for some reason, becomes a thumping blow from any sword, axe, or stick you pick up. They have random stats, though not as wild as guns. The same goes for armor, which primarily enhances your class abilities, like relics in the mainline Borderlands games, rather than providing any actual protection.
Skill your baby
While every class in the previous game had multiple skill trees, here they only have one (though they do unlock a second active special skill, like the bayonet warlock can choose to be invisible instead of the knife-throwing tornado). Instead, once you reach the higher ranks, you can build diversity by part-time and choose a second career. My Spore Guard doubles as a spellcaster, becoming a Spore Master. I mostly just stick to the reliable fungal abilities, though. After playing a lot of Pathfinder, the thought of having to get into overly intense classroom interactions with the Galactic Brain again makes me sick.
(Image credit: 2K Games)
Performance
On my RTX 3080, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands runs at over 100 fps at highest settings, but cutscenes are locked at 30 fps. The only time it stuttered was when I got an error saying that my connection to Shift (the network you need to register for multiplayer) is down. Another message that the connection is active will appear immediately, accompanied by a shake. Oddly, it doesn’t happen in multiplayer, but it happens semi-regularly when I’m single-player.
As with previous Borderlands games, you’ll need to increase FoV and decrease appearance sensitivity. Strangely, the hotspot of the left arrow on each menu slider is slightly off. You can click the right arrow just fine, but you have to click close but not actually the left arrow.
The last notable change is the world map. Instead of zooming in and out of empty areas in the vehicle, place a tilt-shifting top-down tabletop between the landmasses, covered with dice, statuettes, and overflowing junk food. It’s super cute, full of side quests and random encounters that trigger the battle arena as you walk through the long grass.
It’s certainly a reference to Pokémon, but in Tiny Tina’s Wonderland, many of the iconic Borderlands references plenty of humor apply to goals that aren’t RPGs. The Smurfs, Don Quixote and Monkey Island have extended storylines. The last one is particularly puzzling because Monkey Island was fun in the first place, and redoing a skeleton called Bones Three-Wood with Guybrush Threepwood wasn’t so much fun.
Every now and then, though, it lands with astonishing precision, usually when your advisors—two players voiced by Andy Samberg and Wanda Sykes—repeatedly talk about role-playing stereotypes. Anyone who has played D&D or similar games will be familiar with them. She’s the one who knows all the rules and how to kill everything most effectively; he’s the one who cares about the backstory and wants to solve all problems through seduction.
(Image credit: 2K Games)
There are times when it’s a pretty accurate experience of tabletop RPGs, such as when players focus on small NPCs they decide to distrust for arbitrary reasons, and Tina fails to convince them to move on. It made me cringe, but I smiled in pain. To my credit, to my surprise, Tiny Tina’s “Wonderland” does find new angles to a comedy about role-playing.
That’s for sure, it’s more fun than Borderlands 3. It helps that Will Arnett, who is Dragon King, becomes an interesting villain. Because of course he knew: he was Will Arnett. The smug monologue is what he’s all about, and if he can never match the handsome Jack in Borderlands 2, it’s just because no one will.
I went back to the Borderlands 2 DLC that inspired Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands to see how I feel about it today, although I missed some of the quality of life features added by Borderlands 3 that make it Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands like the mantle without having to hold down E key to pick up ammo, can fast travel from anywhere, and only need occasional side quests to properly upgrade the main questline, not bloody hours all the time – it’s a riot.
(Image credit: 2K Games)
If anything, I like it better now. That DLC isn’t just a bunch of jokes about guys rolling the dice too hard, or what it’s like to fumble for a skill check to do something you probably shouldn’t roll for it in the first place. It’s also a fantasy retelling of Borderlands 2, with the cast reimagined as knights and wizards, much like The Wizard of Oz. The thing it most effectively imitates is itself.
Meanwhile, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is largely disconnected from the Borderlands game it’s in, with only a handful of cameos (including Claptrap, sorry haters). This feels like a missed opportunity, because Borderlands 3 is a bit of a disaster, and a follow-up that blows its mind will have a lot of material available.
However, it still succeeds more often than fails. That’s partly because the Borderlands formula has been honed over the years.While other looter shooters use crafting systems or try to make you care about gear levels and repeatable activities and collect 15 different types of shards (why? always Fragments? ), Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is just another game where you shoot bad guys with ridiculous guns so you can take more ridiculous guns from their corpses. Sometimes, in between, it provides a gimmick about how messy the average game of D&D is, and it hits me like a knife in my heart.
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